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by velmadinkley



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, and it's gonna focus on her as well as her feelings for yang, it's basically the entire series but from blake's perspective, it's gonna brush over some important bits, slow burn i guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 07:37:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16929168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velmadinkley/pseuds/velmadinkley
Summary: she fights off the small grimm they offer up as if they’re flies. she spars with other potential students and uses techniques maybe too distanced from their formal training learned at their schools. and in a matter of a few hours, blake belladonna gets accepted into beacon.-blake, through the series. discovering herself and discovering how to let herself be happy.





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**Author's Note:**

> hello! i'm here writing a multichapter fic for the first time in a long time. this is basically gonna be me filling in gaps i want filling in blake's story, up to and including her developing feelings for yang. 
> 
> please PLEASE help me improve this by giving me feedback! constructive criticism is always welcome in these parts. 
> 
> enjoy!

she goes as far away as she can, after she leaves adam. once she’s travelled for over a day, once she’s completely exhausted herself, she finds a room in an inn cheap enough that she can afford it, and she sobs. 

-

it’s when she’s wandering around looking for food the next day that she sees it. a poster on the side of a pub, dirty and ripped. she’d known about beacon academy since she was a child. she’d known about all four of the huntsmen academies, but they had all seemed so far away and adam had always spoken of them as if they were beneath them. 

but the entrance exams were going to be held in a few months. 

and beacon academy could give her a bed, food. it could be a place where she could right her mistakes. a place where she could get stronger. 

a place where adam would have to face hundreds of trained fighters, should he decide to target it. 

“move out of the way, animal.” someone bumps into her with his cart, and her cat ears stiffen. she glares at the guy scoffing at her, takes a deep breath, looks down and away from him to control herself.

on the floor, next to the cart’s tracks, lies a black piece of cloth.

no. a bow.

she picks it up and dusts the dirt off. “thanks, asshole.” she mutters, and smirks, taking it as payment. 

-

she considers writing to her parents to ask them to send over some of her things. to let them know that she’s in vale, that she’s finally followed in their footsteps. to say way more things that need to be said, like apologies and begging for forgiveness and asking how they are because she doesn’t know because she hasn’t spoken to them in too too long. then she decides against it. 

once she works out how to wrap her bow around her ears, getting temp work becomes easy. at an inn, she cleans the common rooms and does the dishes for a spare bed. a book shop owner takes her help on evenings, takes a shine to her and lets her keep the old and damaged books that nobody’s ever gonna buy. 

when she has a spare moment, she trains. and it’s less and less that he enters her thoughts, only keeping hold over her in the darkest of nights. otherwise, she keeps her focus on working, and reading, and getting by.

the weeks pass quickly, and she’s a little nervous. she has no idea how difficult the exams are going to be, how particular.

but the exams come, and they’re… a breeze. she fights off the small grimm they offer up as if they’re flies. she spars with other potential students and uses techniques maybe too distanced from their formal training learned at their schools. and in a matter of a few hours, blake belladonna gets accepted into beacon.

-

she’s just finished putting what little stuff she has in storage when she’s making her way to the welcome talk, fully expecting to ignore it all by reading her book. she runs into the heiress to the schnee dust company on the way, who is exactly what she expected. with her is a young girl in red, who looks so pure and happy-go-lucky she’d probably try and make a friend out of blake. 

but blake isn’t here for friends. especially ones that would spend so much time with her they might notice how weird it was that she seemed to be constantly wearing a bow in her hair. 

so she walks away.

later, she finds out she has to sleep in a room with a tonne of students she doesn’t know. it isn’t all bad, really. it reminds her of camping with the white fang, back when she was younger and more excitable about changing the world for good. 

she nestles in the corner of the room by herself, and goes to continue with her book. except it’s dark, she remembers, and so makes a point of lighting some candles so she can see better. 

it’s not long til she sees the girl again, being towed by someone with the most vibrant blonde hair blake had ever seen. she tries to get them to leave, but they’re annoyingly (and, she won’t admit, endearingly) persistent. they’re bright and joyful in a way she hadn’t experienced in a while, and eventually she has to fight not to let her lips curl in a smile. 

ruby and yang. huh.

the next morning, she’s getting her weapon from her locker when hears some familiar voices. she almost goes to say hi, but then yang mentions something about teammates, and blake goes into a bit of a panic, stays hidden on the other side of the lockers. she didn’t even think… and she was supposed to be keeping a low profile. she was supposed to be keeping herself to herself.

but, she supposes, as she listens to the sisters bicker, maybe having teammates wouldn’t be so bad. maybe she couldn’t really avoid having friends, if she was going to be spending four whole years here. 

(blake certainly doesn’t want to become like adam, bitter and spiteful. and that could happen, she guesses, if she isolates herself completely.)

she slinks away, goes on her own to the cliff face where they were told to meet. is one of the first to get catapulted into the forest, uses her gambol shroud to swing down onto the grassy floor. above her, she sees other students flying above. sees one in particular, catapulting herself further with her fists, a mass of golden hair whipped by the wind. 

before she knows what she’s doing, blake is following yang. she’s quick to find her, but stays hidden, watches yang quip with only herself and then some grimm as an audience, and it makes blake smile. yang is brash and brazen and beautiful. she faces her opponents head on, honest in her rage. it’s a sight to behold. 

the last of the grimm takes position below where she’s crouching in a tree. blake realises this is her chance, to make eye contact before anyone else, and takes the grimm out with one slash of her blade.

it falls, defeated, and suddenly yang is stood before her, and they’re looking at one another, their partnership sealed. 

“i could’a taken him.” yang says, and blake believes it.

-

they make their way through the forest relatively easily. yang talks a lot, and blake thinks at first that it’s because she doesn’t like awkward silences. but the more she talks (about inconsequential stuff, about grimm, about her gauntlets, about ruby), blake realises it’s just yang being yang. just yang being… genuine. and that genuineness being a state of optimism so displaced from blake’s character that blake shouldn’t be as drawn to her as she is. 

blake, for her part, speaks only when it would be rude not to. she’s never been the great with new people anyway, and she’s still unsure about how comfortable she can make herself in this place. 

but later, yang chooses a ‘cute little pony’ because of course she does, and blake feels a warmth she calls fondness grow inside of her. one that grows still when she sees how much she cares about her sister. 

a fondness that ignites when she watches yang jump into the mouth of a nevermore, punching blasts down its throat, when she fights alongside blake as if they’ve been fighting alongside one another for years. 

but she has to remain closed off, otherwise they might realise she’s a faunus. otherwise they might reject her. 

not that she cares.

(they do make a great team, though, she thinks, as she watches the body of a nevermore fall from a precipice, dead.)

-

blake stays mostly quiet, in those early months. she does stick around yang quite a bit, though, because she’s her team mate and partner and it just makes sense to. 

she thinks it might be irritating for yang, sometimes, having someone with such a dark disposition to be around her all the time. but yang never says anything to bat her off, even seems to enjoy her company despite it all. 

and blake starts to enjoy being around people again. it’s the closest thing she can get to having a family again, she doesn’t let herself think, and sometimes finds herself forgetting that she isn’t supposed to be relaxing and joking and having fun. she even starts to soften around weiss.

but then weiss starts saying all these horrible things about faunus, about her family. and it all starts to shatter in front of her. before she can really think about it, though-

a boy, a faunus, runs off of a ship, and past her, and with one look blake just knows he can tell she’s like him. before she can really think about that, though-

weiss is saying even worse things, and blake sees red, talks more than she has in a whole semester in one argument that goes on and on, into the night. and it reaches a crescendo when weiss claims to be a victim, talking about her family friends going missing as if that hadn’t been happening to blake, to her entire species, since forever, and on a systematic scale. 

blake gives herself away, and feels her stomach drop. 

all her months of careful concealment, of holding her tongue, and it falls apart because she gets too emotional. so she runs, and cries- her first cry since that night she left the white fang for good- and the faunus boy finds her with her ears free for the first time in what feels like forever. 

-

they spend the night, what’s left of it, wandering the streets. the faunus- sun, blake learns- spends a while trying to cheer her up before asking her questions. she deflects at first, and he takes it well, which leads her hours later, teacup in hand, to being more open than she had been with anyone in months. years. it’s a relief, mostly. 

but when she’s finished talking, she looks up and realises she’d opened herself up to the wrong person. 

sun seems to realise it, too, and asks her why she hadn’t told her friends instead. blake thinks back to the past semester, to their laughing and their warm smiles. to ruby’s kindness and to weiss’ tentative offerings of friendship and to yang’s…. well, to yang. and she doesn’t really remember. 

until the fear that those moments of friendship could turn sour, could turn to prejudice and ignorance and judgement at any moment boils up, and her ears lower in on themselves.  
blake doesn’t answer him. instead, she finishes her tea, and ignores the emotions that got her into this mess. instead, she focuses on proving weiss (and her worst fears) wrong. 

but she can’t, because on her and sun’s stakeout, the white fang are there, and she feels sick. she hates how they make all faunus look, and she hates how humans decide that one group of faunus dictates how all faunus are. and she hates that she was wrong. and oh, she’s determined for the fight that she gets. 

it happens quickly, and when its over she realises ruby’s there, and before she can ramble out an apology, ruby hugs her, tells her how happy she is that blake’s okay. so she brushes over the things she told sun, and ruby takes it well. really well. compliments her on her ears as she’s tying them up again. 

she wants to be cool and collected when weiss and yang show up, but when she sees them she can’t help but start babbling. weiss surprises her by caring about her, and giving her what blake thinks is the closest she’ll get to an apology (she’ll take it). yang looks happy to see her, but stays mostly quiet. 

-

they get back to beacon and they’re walking to their room when yang falls into step with her and they walk together a few feet behind ruby (talking excitedly about her fight) and weiss (pretending to be exasperated with ruby). 

eventually, yang speaks, her voice soft. “you scared us for a while there.”

“I know. i’m sorry. i just…” blake means to carry on, but the words don’t come.

“it’s okay. you don’t need to explain yourself. i get it.” yang hesitates, and then stops walking, gently grasping blake’s wrist to face her, her voice becoming more serious. “just know that you can always talk to us, and we’ll always have your back. i know, no matter what, that you’re a good person.”

“how?” blake asks, because really, she’s not given much reason for them to trust her. 

“i think you’ve shown us more of yourself than you think while you’ve been here, blake.” yang beams, affectionate, and blake’s heart thumps in her chest. “plus, only wretched people don’t laugh at my jokes. and you’ve laughed at plenty of them.” 

blake feels blood rise to her cheeks. “i have not!” 

yang prods her playfully, teasing, before continuing to walk ahead. “sure you haven’t.” blake jogs after her, and feels like she’s on her way home.


End file.
